In the service they had called her—ostensibly behind her back—“Captain Buster.” Meaning ballbuster. Meaning she was as hard on them as she was on herself. It was a sweet play on her actual name, Custer, and far better than the comparison to her unrelated namesake, George, of Little Bighorn fame. Capt. Meghan Custer had no particular ambition to become a general, and certainly not to annihilate Native Americans. Her main desire was to keep her soldiers out of harm’s way, conduct whatever mission they had been assigned, and get them all back home safely. Home being an FOB, forward operating base, nestled in some godforsaken chunk of Iraq or Afghanistan. Three tours, and she was only thirty-five. No boyfriend back home, certainly not children. She bled for those women in her unit who kept up brave faces as they Skyped with their children, blew kisses to their babies. She understood the keen desire to have family back home praying for you every day, someone whose image you kept in mind as you “fought for freedom,” but in some ways she saw it as indulgent selfishness.
Besides her parents, she had left no one behind except a couple of cousins and a jingoistic uncle whose pickup truck sported a pair of snapping flags, Old Glory and the black MIA/POW flag. He was her father’s older brother, and his war, like her dad’s, had been Vietnam. Where her dad’s experience had led to a fifteen-year career in the army after the war’s end, an honorable discharge, and putting it all behind him, her uncle’s war had ended in alcoholism and a constant need to keep that war’s failure front and center in his politics. When Meghan sat with him in his double-wide trailer, he told her that he was proud of her. And, especially, that her dad was proud that she was picking up his sword; the tacit suggestion that it was her late brother, Mark, who had been expected to carry on the military tradition in the Custer family, but she would do. Meghan didn’t quite agree. She knew that neither one of her parents was particularly pleased with her having chosen to follow in her father’s footsteps.
Now she leaves only tread marks in the dirt. No footsteps ever again.
The only thing that helped was a little pill, slightly ovoid in shape, a miracle of science in the battle against chronic pain. In another century, Meghan imagined, she would have had to find a Chinese opium parlor in order to find relief from the tidal pain in her back, rising and falling almost as if it were directed by the moon. She wondered if opium parlors ever had handicap-accessible entries. She wished that the permanent numbness of the scars on her face would migrate to the division in her spine where pain sat upon the blank space where her legs felt nothing at all. She could stick a pin in her thigh and feel nothing; she could pinch her face where the grafts were shiny with a combination of man-made material and human-grown skin and feel only the pressure.
The VA doc was certainly willing to prescribe the little pills, with a mild and perfunctory caution not to abuse them. His smile, knowing. Knowing that her self-control was blown away as much as her usefulness to the army. Honorable discharge. Purple Heart. Big deal. Done and sprung. She far more valued the tiny lapel pin depicting the emblem of the Cavalry, her division, that her father had pinned to her collar that overcast summer day when she’d reported for basic training. It was his. And having it meant the world. Having it meant that her father, although initially opposed to the idea of his daughter becoming a career soldier, was proud of her choice. Not once did he mention that he’d always expected to pin this on Mark’s uniform.
Meghan pushed her chair away from the dorm-size refrigerator, where a bottle of water cooled. Everything in this halfway house of a rehabilitation center was set low for people like her. She knew that outside, where she was supposed to be after today, she would be reaching and looking up like a five-year-old in a grown-up’s world for the rest of her life. Everyone in her life would have to bend down to look her in the eye.
“You’re ready, Meghan,” the occupational therapist had assured her, pleased with how skillfully Meghan used her modified utensils. Pleased with the way she could maneuver from wheelchair to desk chair, to toilet, to bed using the slant board. How clever she’d become in protecting nerveless feet from banging against doorjambs.
Tomorrow she would be released to move back in with her parents. Thirty-five years old, consigned to being dependent upon two late-middle-aged people working through their own miseries. Her mother suffered from arthritis. Her dad had high blood pressure. How was it fair to thrust a disabled daughter back into their lives? She should be taking care of them. Hadn’t they suffered enough? First, her older brother, Mark, pride of the Custers, hope of the family, the one actually meant to follow in Dad’s footsteps, was killed by a teenaged drunk driver in a car wreck the day before his high school graduation. Now she was wrecked. Her mother put on this sad, brave face every time she came to visit, as if she didn’t dare let her guard down and remind Meghan of what had happened, as if smiling and gossiping about neighbors would override the fact that they were in a hospital, not a city park. Her dad ran around making sure that everyone was taking better care of her than of anyone else in this godforsaken museum of wounded warriors; asserting his paternal powers, believing that a captaincy now thirty years out-of-date gave him the authority. How was she going to live with this day after day?
The pill went down. Meghan pushed herself away from the fridge, covered her lap with the handmade lap rug that her mother’s next-door neighbor had crocheted. It was an ugly thing, pink and green, in some homage to Lilly Pulitzer. Floppy crocheted blooms stuck out of it, catching on everything. But she could hide her damaged hand under it. Meghan waited for the pill to take effect. They’d be here soon.
“We got it for a steal.” Meghan’s dad stood beside the white conversion van, holding out his arms as if he were some kind of American Dad car salesman. Meghan half-listened to him crowing about features and accessories, all of which seemed more designed for adventurous campers than a chick in a wheelchair who couldn’t get into the driver’s seat. The point of the van wasn’t her freedom; it was their ability to transport her. It was a glorified ambulance. The good news? The windows were tinted, so no one would be able to see her face.
Dad pressed a button and a flat ramp lowered itself to the ground. Mom literally applauded the moment it was level with the sidewalk cut. Meghan felt her mother grasp the chair handles. “No. I’ll do it.” She hadn’t yet “graduated” to a motorized wheelchair, so pushing the chair was all manual effort. Meghan’s physical therapist had spent months working on Meghan’s upper body, promising that she’d come out of the rehab hospital able to get herself around. The day before, the therapist had given Meghan a pair of fingerless gloves like the kind weight lifters used. “To prevent blisters. Pavement is a lot harder to travel on than linoleum.”
“Too late.” Meghan had held up her scarred hand. “I don’t even feel them. But thanks. This will keep them from scaring any little kids. Unlike my face.”
This grievance was not a new one to the therapist. It had become a daily complaint and one that the physical therapist had learned to ignore rather than encourage. “I’ll see you next week,” she’d said, referring to a house-call appointment. She hadn’t even waited till Meghan worked her way out of the room, new gloves still sitting on her lap, before turning her attention to a incoming patient.
Once Meghan was in the van, her chair tethered down, her dad suggested a celebratory lunch out. It had been more than two years from the incident in Afghanistan to a hospital in Germany and then a series of facilities until her transfer back here to her parents’ home in Florida. In all that time, Meghan had scarcely breathed fresh air, only when transported from one VA hospital to another; then to this rehab hospital where she’d lived, yes, lived, for five months. The brief time on the sidewalk before being lifted into the van was as close as she’d come to being outside, and now the van was filled with the air conditioner pumping out against the summer heat. Not air, some false equivalent to air. She shivered. “I’d rather just go home.” She imagined that she could get to the deck, get through the slider, sit in the sun, flaunt the advice against direct sunlight on her scars and hope that the heat would remind her of in-country, of being with her troops. Of being a soldier.
The wheelchair wouldn’t fit through the sliding door to the lanai. It was the one door in their tiny house that they hadn’t thought to enlarge. “You know, we’ve been talking about putting in a French door there,” her dad said, and she shook her head, saying, “Don’t worry about it.” Meghan could see the scars of unpainted Sheetrock revealing where the opening to her bedroom, once the guest room, had been made larger, and where the doorway to the downstairs bathroom had been retrofitted. Both doors had paddle handles—no need for turning a knob. Except that she couldn’t close the door behind her. “Mom! Can you close the door?”
“Do you want some help, honey?”
“I can manage.” First thing they’d taught her in rehab: how to lift herself from chair to toilet. Unfortunately, in this house, the toilet wasn’t situated in a convenient way and the effort ended up humiliating her.
That evening, they sat out on the lanai, watching a lightning storm approach. Her dad had lifted her out of her chair and her mother had folded it so that they could get her and her chair out here. Meghan could feel how the strain of lifting her hurt her father, who’d had a bad back for years. He certainly couldn’t do that on a regular basis. No one spoke, and the weight of failure bore down on all three.